Bard of Caid - I won. *grin*

Preparations - So when I last left off, I was headed home from work on Friday. My roomie called up and promised to make me dinner. I got out to my car, smacked my forehead, and realized I still had to do laundry. So I jetted over to the laundromat just 2 blocks from my work, threw in three loads of wash, and sat in my car (in the rain) working on my Turkish story-telling piece. The requirement was that any of our selections could not be longer than 8-10 minutes. (That's really long, by the way!) But this story was just barely under 10 minutes, and I had to practice it several more times outloud to ensure I could do it under the time limit. Fortunately, the wash was 30 minutes long and the dry was 20 minutes long, so I had time to complete my recitation 5 times before heading home. I definitely got some benefit from the repeated practice!

I got home around 9 pm, and Mel served me some cheese tortellini, some wonderful marinara sauce, and pan full of carrots and peas. I hadn't eaten in nearly 9 hours, and I was just devouring my food. So I stopped halfway, saved the rest for later, and started in on my final preparations. Kim showed up a few minutes later, and we started sewing. She does some costuming professionally, so it was really nice that I could just hand her things and trust that she was doing as good or even better than I could. Yippee! She finished adding the trim at the neckline, pinned the hem trim on the coat, sewed it on too, and then we both finished hand-stitching the side seams of the hem trim.

Meanwhile, I finished the two verses for my piece about "Honor," finished up the documentation for both the "honor" piece and the turkish story telling, and then completed the copy/paste for "Mara's Song" into documentation format. I stopped at one point to finish the other half of my dinner, injested a pot of coffee along the way, and finally sent Kim home around 2 am. We were joking over lunch with friends about who was betting on which numbers for how many hours sleep I would get. Mark said "Zero," Laura said "Two," Kim said "Three," Brenda said "Three-and-a-half," and I said "Five." Apparently no one wins the betting pool [of no money, btw], because I got "Two-and-a-half" hours sleep. Once Kim had gone home, I went to the 24-hour Kinko's in my neighborhood, made sharp nice printouts of my documentation for each piece, made copies for all the judges, and returned home. Then I went ahead and showered at whatever-o-dark-thirty, and got dressed in my undershift, then fell asleep propped up in bed on zillions of pillows. When I got to wake up, I was already "half-dressed" and my hair was mostly dry, so it was easy to put up in all my extensions and braids.

12th Night - By 7am I was fully dressed, coifed, packed, and ready to go [without having eaten or had any coffee, because I was completely out]. Jeff and Adrienne arrived, we packed everything in their car, and we were through the drive-through (burritos and coffee!) and on the road by 8am. The site was anywhere between 90-minutes and 2+ hours away, as the mapping software estimated, but we made good time even with the rain, and were there nice and early before opening court.

Oh! So, the "mystery instrument" that I hadn't been revealing was a mandolin -- round-backed and probably from about 1921, according to the maker's marks we could squint and see on the inside the neck, written in pencil. It's a really nice sound. If you've never seen a mandolin, picture something related to a guitar but where the strings are, it's about half as wide (so it's narrow like the neck of a violin). The body of the instrument is tear-drop shaped, and a little bigger than a banjo. There are double-strings for each note, meaning you only have four notes to play, but there are eight strings and each set of two strings is identical, a little like a 12-string guitar, but without the high/low octave pairs. The strings are metal, and the neck of the instrument has frets, which are those cross bars you see on a guitar but you don't see on a violin.

I wish I had larger hands or longer fingers, so I could play a lute. The lute has such a wide neck for the strings, and I cannot reach around the entire neck to press all the strings. But the mandolin has such a narrow neck, it doesn't hurt my hand or wrist. I just love *everything* about this instument, and I'm completely enamoured with doing music history research on all the lute-family instruments and when each was invented, and where each was popular when.

Before opening court with the King and Queen, I spent some time tuning the mandolin (tough to do in very rainy weather), and sang one of my songs to 3 friends as a warm-up. Some of you may remember "Mara's Song" which I wrote in October as a memorial and tribute to a friend who passed away at the end of the summer. One of the categories was "A Piece You Consider Your Best" and so not only was I proud of my composition of Mara's Song, I also pushed my challenge to myself by learning to play the mandolin with the song. I wrote a little counterpoint melody to play as the opening to the song, and then played accompaniment chords as I sang.

After opening court, we had a break for lunch, and then we held the competition. We randomly chose numbers, which Finella had matched to different performing orders. I selected "three" and it turned out that meant I went first. Domhnall (pronouced "Dole") went second, followed by Catelin, followed by Sadb. Then we had to do our "Best" in round one, our "Period Documented" piece for round two, our piece about "Honor" for round three, and our new composition for round four.

The Bard of Caid competition for the past 3 times it's been held, has required a "Compose Something on the Spot, during the competition, while the other performers are on stage, and you'll need to include these three random words we give you." The first year, the words were "Moon," "Love," and "Hare" (like the bunny rabbit). Last year, the words were "Scion," "Hands," and "Honor." This year, the words were "Chaste," "Merit," and "Silver" -- with extra credit for including "Lentil." (Finella had randomly polled some of the audience to come up with the three words, and she had to talk them out of requiring "Lentil," so she threw it back in the mix for the "extra credit" points.)

So, I had to go first for every round. Yoikes.

First up, my "Best." I had been wearing the new Black and metal-thread brocade Turkish coat all morning, when I was walking around socializing. For my "Best" piece, I swapped out of the Turkish coat and put on the black and purple wool overdress that I made for last year's Festival of the Rose. I brought my favorite folding wooden stool, and performed Mara's Song with the mandolin.

Next, the other three performers did their personal best, while I tried to start my on-the-spot composition. But I had to listen to Sadb's song, while was this absolutely hysterical comedic piece about wearing "Cloth on My Head." Many of us hate wearing veils and coifs at first, in the SCA, and then later we find that some of them are wonderful (in the right time and place, made from the right materials). Bless her heart, Sadb sent me home with a printout of the words, and I totally want to learn to sing this song. It's fantastic!

Then I swapped out of the wool overdress back into the Turkish coat, and performed a story from "The Book of Dede Korkut" -- a collection of 13th Century Turkish sagas. My selection was a piece of the tale of Bamsi Beryek of the Grey Horse, specifically the section where they send the Bard Dede Korkut to ask for the hand of Lady Chichek for Bamsi, from her brother Crazy Karchar (who kills any man who asks for his sister). It's a terribly funny tale that includes a sheep-hold full of flea-infested sheep, and such great lines like "These [fleas] are not the kind to be sorted into the ones you like and the ones you don't!" while Karchar is being eaten alive by the fleas, and "Why all the uproar? Have you gone all stupid?" and "Has God written upon your white forehead doom?" ... whereupon we all crack up laughing at "DOOOM!" because we think of a cartoon where a little crazy robot sings the "doom song," the lyrics of which are just "Doom, doom, doom, doom" in a tiny sing-song happy voice. (Invader Zim, by the way.)

Then for my piece about "Honor," I wore no overcoat or overdress at all, but just bright yellow in my underdress, and sang a new composition called The Swordsman's Honor which I just wrote this week (or week and a half). The premise was that I wanted to include foreign language into my performance, and I decided to find some of the period fencing manuals written by the swordsmasters and use direct quotes (preferably in the original language(s) but translations too) as part of the lyrics.

Finally, the composition was last. I missed out on watching and listening to all the other performers, working on this composition during rounds 1-3. But I'm really proud of how it came out. My new piece, Sunshine, developed based on one real-world encounter when a friend gave me a tiny mirror and said, "See yourself through my eyes." The rest of the song is my artistic embellishment on the friendship with him. I still have to figure out what tune I created on the spot, before I can record the music. But it really played well to the audience, and it nearly drew me to tears with the emotional outpouring I was able to give it. I'm quite pleased with the song.

The announcement of the winner of the competition didn't come for hours, since we were done around 3:15 or 3:30, and the feast wasn't until 5 and they wanted to announce it at the beginning of feast. All four competitors had no plans of staying for feast, so we were really just loitering until the announcement. In the mean time, I was able to spend some time getting "alms from the peers of the realm" (my assignment from my Laurel), and just chattering with old and new friends alike. A bunch of us spent some time with Jaime & Robert, who are fairly new to the SCA but who have mutual friends from other groups, like my friend Mike who stayed at my apartment this summer for a short span of time. Jaime is a professional opera singer, amongst other talents, and both of them are just too much darn fun and so the time flew rapidly in their company.

In the feast hall, the King and Queen gave us each artisan-cast pewter pins as thank you's for competiting, and then they announced me as the winner and invested me with the Champion's Cloak. (And because I'm short, it goes easily past my calves.) Once we'd gone around getting hugs of congratulations and goodbye, seven of us met up at a restaurant about a mile away, and had drinks and dinner together. It was quite fun, with Caterina and Lot, Mina and me, Gemma and Iago (that's Jaime and Robert), plus Grainne. Then it was time to hit the road, and return home.

Today's Recovery - I slept, and slept, and then slept some more. Literally. I forgot to turn off my alarms on my cell phone, so I was awakened at 6am (after going to sleep at 10:30 pm). Then I took a nap until 7, again until 8, again until 9:30, and then around 10:30 I decided it was time to stop napping and get up for the day. My roomie and I spent a lazy afternoon around the house, me picking up all the detritus strewn about, her sewing more costuming for herself. She also dyed some silk for her Ren Faire gig this summer, which came out gorgeous. I heartily approve!

Then in the evening, we picked up Adrienne and braved the rain and cold to meet up with Emily and Phillip for Em's birthday (which turned out to be Phillip's birthday too). We met Phillip's sister Esther, step-sister Edith, and older brother Frank, plus two new friends Josh and Holly. Jeff arrived before us, so we hung out with him in the bar until everyone was there for dinner. Throughout dinner, we found Holly and Josh so darn fun and with similar interests to so many of us, that we exchanged emails and phone numbers before the night was through. Holly's a film director and actress, Josh is a stunt man and theatrical sword choreographer... they've met Alan and Theresa, and Holly already chatted with Theresa about learning to spin yarn... and just several other fun details throughout the conversation. I've already enjoyed looking through parts of her website, and hopefully we'll get to spend more time hanging out with them in the future. They're good people!

Now I've got copies of the photos from yesterday that my roommate took, plus the photos that Robert took with my camera, all to sort through and touch-up before posting them online. The event was held at a church, and the santuary lighting was quite dim, so the photos are very dark. But Robert got some very funny shots of my Turkish story -- I was apparently much more animated than I thought I was. They're hysterical. Hopefully I can get them finished and loaded this week. You know I'll include a link when they're done.

Until then, enjoy the one photo I've gotten so far, which Sabyna took after the competition, just outside in the courtyard. That's my new Turkish coat, by the way, and my "apprentice cousin" Jon Thomme in the background.

I think the strangest thing about all this is the "Oh my goodness. I'm a Kingdom Champion."

On the drive home last night, we chattered quite a bit about what Lot would like to see me do with the position, and I really appreciated all my friends' thoughts on the matter. It has given me much to think about, and some great ideas. You'll be hearing more about this over the year, most certainly.

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Today's Blessing That I'm Thankful For: All the friends who helped me get through this: You make it all worth it.